Category Archives: full diet of prayer

At men’s breakfast recently, we were thinking about men
leading in prayer. One of the ideas I talked about was the importance of praying
a “full diet” of prayer, when we’re leading in prayer. But this idea is also
very relevant for our own private prayer lives. When we’re finding prayer hard, one thing
Christians sometimes do is to try and inject some creativity into their prayer
time. “Light a candle. Draw some pictures. Get expressive. Turn it into a craft
session, with colouring pens, and scissors”. I don’t recommend that. Those
things are like looking for the equivalent of sugar rush. What we actually need
is to be committed to a “full diet” of prayers.

The Bible is crammed with examples of prayer for us to learn
from:

There are prayers of adoration. Psalms 146-150 each begin and end with “Praise the Lord!”. The heavenly worship in Revelation includes pure adoration: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Rev 4:8). This type of prayer is like your spiritual meat. It’s spending time focussing on the character of our great Triune God and is like protein for your soul.

There are prayers of confession.
Daniel humbled himself in Daniel 9, after reading God’s promises to
Jeremiah, and prayed a big prayer of confession. Ezra does something similar in
Ezra 9. The people of God spend a quarter of the day confessing their sins in
Nehemiah 9. Maybe this kind of prayer is like eating your greens; it’s less
popular or easy, but really important for our ongoing spiritual health. God
wants us to keep short accounts with him, and the Spirit humbles us all the
days of our life (Rom 7:24).

There are prayers of thanksgiving.
David prayed a prayer of thanksgiving “on the day the LORD delivered him from
the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul” (2 Samuel 22). In this
type of prayer, we take time to thank God for the good things he’s given us. Regularly
taking time to name the good things we’ve received from him is an important
part of our diet. I particularly know I’m capable of being ungrateful, and need
to be more deliberate here.

There are prayers of supplication.This is the bread and potatoes of
Christian prayer. It means simply asking God for things. We should pray prayers
of supplication for ourselves, and for others. We should pray for our families,
for our church, for our neighbours, for our denomination, for our country, for
the church through the world, and for the world. Even here, maybe we need to
learn to switch from white bread to brown-bread, or from mashed potato to
eating the potato with the skins on! We should aim to line up the things we ask
for with the things the Bible asks for (e.g. Luke 11:2-4; Eph 1:16-21).

The Bible really is packed with spiritually nutritious
prayers. If you told a nutritionist that you only ever eat starch in your diet,
they’d tell you to change what you eat. Why? because a well-balanced diet is
important for your health. Well, the same is true for us spiritually. Why not
take some time to think: which of these types of prayer are lacking from my
regular spiritual diet? Which ones do I need to introduce into my regular
praying? Rather than seeking a spiritual sugar rush, aim to pray a “full diet”
of prayers.